Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

My grandfather had ten children, but he’d called my father his ace, proud of his strength and diligence. My father had known that my grandfather would refuse to let him go. They’d stood on the shore, the sea—as I pictured it—gray as lead, the far coast hardly darker than the low cavernous sky, as if the sun were weaker in 1947, or in that part of the world.

When the uncle visited, he gave my father a thin metal chain, like a necklace. My father, who was eight, tied it to a wood chip and pulled it through the sawdust on the barn floor, imagining it was a train. When it fell off, he searched, raking his fingers through even the dirty sawdust where he hadn’t been. He described how he’d looked in the barn again the next morning, in the bands of light from between the boards. The hogs had begun to grunt, thinking he’d come to feed them.

“That’s how pathetic that life was,” he explained. “That something like that could matter.”

As I wrote these notes, I felt a tension behind my eyes like the onset of exhaustion. Since these stories weren’t of crime, I’d given them little importance. In a restaurant, he’d offhandedly mentioned his uncle—this was among the few childhood experiences he’d shared—and I let myself wonder how my life might have been had I known his family. As I tried to write his stories, I felt his inchoate longing, the regret of a missed opportunity, and I was certain that this boy’s rage was in him still. It had been his first chance to escape, though I still didn’t know what he’d left behind.

✴

I SAT NEXT to the window screen, the telephone on my knees.

His breathing was barely audible. I’d told him about my plan to turn his life into a novel, but he talked about the market. He wasn’t in the mood for stories.

“I’m pretty tired of this business. Sometimes you just get sick of things. I’m sick of working every day. It shouldn’t have to be like this.”

“What are you thinking about doing?”

“There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t told you. A while back I hurt myself. I took a pretty good fall off a freezer. I was trying to fix a light, and I fell on the concrete. Since then there hasn’t been much I can do. I can hardly pick anything up. I think I’ve ruined my back for good. I forget I’m not young anymore. I feel that way, but I guess I’m not.”

I waited, but he didn’t continue.

“You sounded pretty bad last time we talked,” I said, trying to find words for the feeling I had. “I was worried. You sounded like … like you didn’t want to live.”

He was silent, and I listened for the soft motion of his breath.

“Don’t say anything to anyone—not even to your brother or sister. I didn’t want you to know. I thought maybe you couldn’t handle it. If I tell you this, will you not tell anyone?”

I had to swallow, lifting my chin, before I could speak.

“All right. I won’t say anything.”

“I didn’t want to tell you, but near the end of the summer, I decided to kill myself. I think I’d known I would for a while. I sold a few shepherds as police dogs and gave the rest away. It was the first time since the pen that I haven’t had shepherds. I don’t think I realized until then that I would do it.”

I held my eyes closed and then blinked and stared beneath the tilted-back shade of the lamp, letting the light wash in.

“I bought heroin,” he went on. “I read in the paper that people were overdosing on China White, so I went and got some. I bought enough to fix ten people, and I took it all. It put me in a coma for more than two days. When I woke up, I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. I was blistered all over. I went to the doctor, and he told me that our bodies move when we sleep, that way the blood doesn’t settle. I guess I didn’t move. I had blisters all over my thighs. One of them covered the entire heel of my foot. I could hardly stand.”

“Was that when I called?” I studied my voice, surprised at how empty my mind was, how still everything felt around me.

“I was pretty sick,” he said. “I spent two days in complete darkness. It wasn’t like sleeping. It was like I was gone. I think I was afraid afterward. I don’t remember. I went to the doctor and told him. He put me on medication.”

“You’re still on medication?”

“It seems to make things a little better.”

My throat felt dry, my chest constricted as if I wanted to cough. Calmly, I asked if he was going to try again. I didn’t want him to think I was too weak to hear this, but I was surprised at my steadiness, though I felt empty and unmoored.

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding far away. “I don’t know if it’s worth risking that there really is a God.”

“You haven’t given up on God?” I asked, hearing how I sounded more startled by this than by his talk of suicide.

“I gave up on the Catholic Church. I don’t think God’s part of the church. Sometimes I think he has nothing to do with it.”

“Have you been going?”

“No. I went a couple times, but there wasn’t anything there for me.”

“Do you think,” I said, searching for the words to make him reconsider, “do you think you can get through all this?”

“Not without wanting to. People in my family live a long time. I don’t want to live that long, but I’m afraid to kill myself. I should have died.”

“Isn’t there something else you can do if the store doesn’t work out? You could go on a trip or something.”

Saying these words, I felt pathetic.

“The store is